Signs of Water Found on 5 Alien Planets

NASA scientists found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. All five planets appear to be hazy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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HowAliensCanFindUs(andViceVersa):Photos

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Despite the occasional report of an extraterrestrial sighting, be it through a microscope revealing curious shapes in a meteorite or a photo of wispy lights taken at the blurry end of a camera lens, aliens have yet to make contact with humans. Even the White House yesterday put out a statement declaring that the federal government "has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race."
Humans may not yet have encountered life outside of our planet, but many scientists see it as an inevitability. In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake came up with the now eponymous equation which provided an estimate of the number of civilizations in our galaxy.
Although scientists continue to debate the application of his formula as well as alternatives, Drake's own solution to the equation is 10,000 civilizations, suggesting intelligent, technologically advanced life outside our planet is common.
How these different civilizations, including our own, find each other is an important question for anyone here on Earth looking for extraterrestrials. Explore how aliens might stumble upon our planet -- and how we might actually spot them first.
BLOG: ARE UFOS ALIEN? NO!

NASA

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Before we can began to search the skies, we have to start by narrowing down our options. Sticking within our own galaxy is a good start, since we're more likely to spot a neighbor closer to us than one further away.
Astronomers may also elect to focus their attention on stars closer to the center of the Milky Way, where 90 percent of its stars are clustered. Furthermore, the stars here are a billion times older than the sun, giving life more time to develop biologically and technologically.
Many stars are unsuitable for nurturing life, and even stars that do have the appropriate "spectral type" may host exoplanets inhospitable to life due to their location relative to their parent star, size or composition.
These criteria would not only help us find aliens, but also help them find us. After all, Earth would stand out as a hospitable planet, according to a paper published in 2007 in Astrophysical Journal.

NASA

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If aliens are looking for us, they're scanning the same, vast, dark and mostly empty expanse of space that we are. It's a good thing then that we're leaving the lights on to make it easier to find us.
According to Abraham Loeb, of Harvard University and Edwin Turner, from Princeton University, by scanning the skies for artificial illumination as opposed to naturally occurring light sources, both human and extraterrestrial astronomers might be able to find signs of life.
Existing telescopes would be able to see a city the size of Tokyo as far as the edges of our solar system.
BLOG: CITY LIGHTS COULD REVEAL ET

NASA/Earth Observatory

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For more than 25 years, the SETI Institute has been scouring the skies for signs of alien life. However, long before the institute was established, scientists have tried to catch a communication signal from another world.
Scientists looking for alien signals use a combination of optical and radio telescopes, such as the one seen here. Dropping in on a signal without knowing the source of the communication is the tricky part, however, and researchers narrow down their search by targeting specific kinds of stars.
With their citizen science program, SETI@home, the institute has enlisted three million additional observers analyzing data for traces of an alien signal.
BLOG: MAN LOOKS FOR ALIENS, LOSES JOB

Corbis

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Have aliens already stopped by for a visit, even though we weren't at the door to meet them? If they have, shouldn't they have left something behind?
An artificial object of alien origin could be lurking in our solar system without our knowledge. As Discovery News' Ray Villard explains: "In a paper published in the 1960s, Carl Sagan, using the Drake Equation, statistically estimated that Earth might be visited every few tens of thousands of years by an extraterrestrial civilization."
Further out beyond our solar system, aliens may have left what essentially amount to interstellar billboards large enough to be seen by, say, a planet-hunting telescope like Kepler. These last two scenarios, of course, envision an extremely technologically advanced civilization well beyond the engineering capabilities of humankind.
At the same time, humans have sent spacecraft beyond the solar system, including Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2. All of these spacecraft are equipped with what are essentially calling cards for the human race -- small plaques in the case of the Pioneer spacecraft and golden records for the Voyager spacecraft (seen here).
SCIENCE CHANNEL: Top 10 Alien Sightings

NASA

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Humans may rely primarily on fossil fuels as their primary means of energy, but that doesn't mean extraterrestrials in a far off civilization have the same power source.
Solar power could be one option, though not quite with the same black panels we use on Earth. A super civilization could even tap into a black hole to meet its energy needs.
If aliens are tapping to these cosmic bodies, that should make them all the more detectable from Earth. How would we know whether an alien race was relying on a black hole as a source of energy? As Discovery News' Ray Villard explains: "Tell-tale evidence would come from measurements that showed the black hole weighed less than 3.5 solar masses. That's the minimum mass for crushing matter into a black hole via a supernova core-collapse."

NASA

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In one of the most unusual -- and highly unlikely -- first-contact scenarios, aliens would be able to recognize us by the level of greenhouse gas emissions we pump into our atmosphere. Not only that, according to a hypothesis put forward by researchers affiliated with NASA and Pennsylvania State University (though not directly tied with either institution), but aliens may use that as cause to wipe out the human race.
In this bizarre set of circumstance, aliens view human advancement as a destructive force spiraling out of control. To avoid the threat of a future adversary, extraterrestrials clear out the competition.
BLOG: TO SAVE THE GALAXY, DESTROY HUMANITY

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected water in the atmospheres of five planets beyond our solar system, two recent studies reveal.

The five exoplanets with hints of water are all scorching-hot, Jupiter-size worlds that are unlikely to host life as we know it. But finding water in their atmospheres still marks a step forward in the search for distant planets that may be capable of supporting alien life, researchers said.

NASA's Kepler telescope was launched to find other planets just like Earth.

DCI

"We're very confident that we see a water signature for multiple planets," Avi Mandell, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., lead author of one of the studies, said in a statement. "This work really opens the door for comparing how much water is present in atmospheres on different kinds of exoplanets -- for example, hotter versus cooler ones." [?The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

The two research teams used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to analyze starlight passing through the atmospheres of the five "hot Jupiter" planets, which are known as WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b.

The atmospheres of all five planets showed signs of water, with the strongest signatures found in the air of WASP-17b and HD209458b.

"To actually detect the atmosphere of an exoplanet is extraordinarily difficult. But we were able to pull out a very clear signal, and it is water," Drake Deming of the University of Maryland, lead author of the other recent study, said in a statement.

Water is thought to be a common constituent of exoplanet atmospheres and has been found in the air of several other distant worlds to date. But the new work marks the first time scientists have measured and compared profiles of the substance in detail across multiple alien worlds, researchers said.

The water signatures were less intense than expected in all cases, likely because the five hot Jupiters are surrounded by a haze of dust, researchers said.

"These studies, combined with other Hubble observations, are showing us that there are a surprisingly large number of systems for which the signal of water is either attenuated or completely absent," Heather Knutson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, a co-author on Deming's paper, said in a statement. "This suggests that cloudy or hazy atmospheres may in fact be rather common for hot Jupiters."

The study led by Mandell came out today (Dec. 3) in The Astrophysical Journal, while the paper led by Deming was published in September in the same journal.